$26 of Software Defeats American Military

reporter writes "A computer program that can be easily purchased for $25.95 off the Internet can read and store the data transmitted on an unsecured channel by an unmanned drone. Drones are crucial to American military operations, for these aerial vehicles enable Washington to conduct war with a reduced number of soldiers. '... the intercepts could give America's enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under US surveillance.'"

Comments

$26 is a lot

[gurps_npc]

How much is a bullet to the brain of the General commanding the war? But you need a trained sniper and an awfully good insertion to get that bullet there.

Counting the cheapest part of the machine is silly.

Software is often free. $26 is a lot for software. The radio reception, etc. and knowing where to aim are all much more expensive and require skill.

Re:$26 is a lot

[IgnoramusMaximus]

If your friend shoots one of my family members and then goes and hides in your house, I'm not picking a fight with you when I come to drag him out. If you decide to get in my way, that's your problem.

Well, its a fine demagoguery you got there, but the actual reality was that the Taliban demanded to see evidence of Bin Laden's responsibility before handing him over (remember that Bin Laden is just a "spiritual leader" - read: "pontificating bore that talks hell of a lot but hasn't actually done much directly" as opposed to other, more hands-on operatives who worked out of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and, in the case of the 9/11 crew, Germany) and the USA flatly refused. Following which the USA invaded declaring any and all comers as "unlawful combatants" with no rights of any kind.

So to keep your analogy straight, you have a case of my friend showing up at my house saying that you are gunning for him, following which you show up with a box of explosives and demand that I hand him over or else "because he did me wrong!". And when I say "hold on for a sec, what proof exactly do you have?" you say "I don't have to explain myself to a non-human like you, far beneath my superior Manifest Destiny self! What I say goes or else! You got 10 minutes to comply!" and then set the bomb off 5 minutes later, killing my wife and maiming my kids, following which you get the biker gang down the street to help you rummage through and "govern" the wreckage. And so now you have two mortal enemies instead of one and not exactly what could be called a "moral high ground".

This is how the Afghanistan mis-adventure is seen by "the other side" and it is of little wonder that the fight will likely go on indefinitely, Taliban having quite a bit (and growing by many accounts) of local support and very able to present itself as the victims of a belligerent, arrogant, foreign, religiously-motivated, supremacist aggressor, victims who will defend their ancestral homeland, their religion and their "way of life" against that aggressor to the bitter end.

I'd say the odds of "victory" in Afghanistan for the USA are pretty much on the same level as those of all the previous Empires ... not entirely zero but any Vegas slot machine looks like a guaranteed retirement plan by comparison.

Re:$26 is a lot

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Your first mistake is assuming that operations against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan started in 2001. The rest of your argument is rendered moot by that mistake. The US has been operating in Afghanistan since the 90's, as a response to earlier Al Qaeda attacks. The 2001 invasion was just the final commitment in a much longer campaign.

Oh I see, so in addition to being the chief sugar-daddy and arms supplier to Al Qaeda throughout 1980s, the USA then proceeded to meddle directly and covertly in Afghanistan as soon as their "allies" won and the USSR withdrew, showing itself utterly duplicitous and untrustworthy to the locals ... and this is improving your case how exactly?

That, of course, hinges on how you define "victory". If all we care about is maintaining majority control over the country and preventing it from being used as a staging area for further attacks against the west, then we've already won.

By that token the Nazis "won" WWII in 1942 ... I mean they occupied and held a lot of territory at the time, "preventing it from being used as a staging area by the Allies", no?

Under any other reasonable definition we ... we haven't achieved all of the goals we've set for ourselves, but the odds of eventually meeting them are pretty much 100%.

Yes, the time-honoured way of getting your ass handed to you: "fail to declare coherent, logical and testable goals, bloviate endlessly about 'progress' and 'democracy' and whatever other abstract and nebulous feel-good concept you can come up with, declare 'victory' and skedaddle home holding your bruised posterior, having met 'your goals' 110%! - whatever those 'goals' morphed into in the end in order to be met 110%". You did not seriously think you are the first would-be conqueror to come up with this?

The opposite forces have no chance of achieving a military victory - the best that they can hope for is that we get bored and go home.

You have an interesting way of defining "boredom", apparently measured in trillions of dollars, thousands of wounded, dead and maimed on your side and many more on theirs...

And yes, all the defenders have to do is to do what they always have done ... to outlast the latest Empire until it crawls back whence it came from. They have an ample precedent for that, although you are of course the Super-extra-specially-exceptional Empire, the American One, so everything will be oh-so-super-specially-extra-exceptionally different for you, despite no substantial changes in the general conditions of the whole affair. Just because America is oh-so-Speeeecial!

As long as we're willing to stay, we can't lose

Which is pretty much a guaranteed loss for the USA as the "will to stay" (translated to real-life measurements of mayhem and treasury) is far, far, lower than "their" will to outlast you - they are after all fighting for their homes, their "way of life" (as they see it) and their religion (and "zealot" is too kind a word to describe most of them) - and all that on top of their vastly disproportionately lower cost of warfare!

Unfortunately, it seems likely that we will decide to leave, largely due to opinions such as yours.

No, you will leave because that is the only thing you can do. The alternative is "total war" and utter bankruptcy of the US Empire. None of the previous empires left because of nay-sayers either, they left because staying further meant Imperial Collapse (and some, like the USSR, waited a tad too long). No amount of Rah-Rah cheer leading will change basic realities of Afghanistan and the logistics of foreign conquests.

I find that truly depressing. Seems like people didn't learn a damn thing from the American mistakes in the 80's.

Re:but what are the hardware costs?

[brusk]

No, demodulating a signal is not news. But not encrypting it in the first place ought to be. (And TFA had a red herring in its focus on the software used to record the signal--the software is probably the easy part, once you've captured the signal).

So instead of leaking this to the news...

[a_nonamiss]

why didn't the DoD just start passing a fake feed from the drone? They could have added another encrypted channel for the real feed, which I would assume is trivial given the military's budget. Then pass fake data over the unencrypted channel. Sometimes disinformation to the enemy is far more valuable than real intelligence. I can see a bunch of jihadis sitting around watching a tv screen. "Look at those infidels. They are going to blow up the wrong building! Our secret base is 100 kilometers away! Say, does anyone else hear that noi..." [BOOM]

Hubris

[mruizcamauer]

"U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds." The Germans did not think the Poles could break their codes. The Japanese did not think the US and the Australians would break their codes. The British did not think Argentina would finish assembling the Exocets on their own without the French manuals or use them in a way differently than designed. The Afghan and Iraqi insurgents have the money and the brains to break into Western weapon systems, don't underestimate them (or the probable help from Iran, Syria, Korea, etc...) The prospect of getting killed is a powerful motivator.

Re:but what are the hardware costs?

[sycodon]

If they can prevent me from watching porn on cable and satellite, they should be able to prevent these guys from hijacking the video feeds from the UAVs.

Re:All your drone are belong to us

[HateBreeder]

Sensationalist... i would expect this from a tabloid.

Title should have been: Unencrypted data broadcasted everywhere ... can be received by anyone!

The leap from that to "$26 of Software Defeats American Military" is quite a big leap in my opinion.

Gung ho

[sjbe]

Not to be harsh about it, but think back to high school and college and ask yourself if you would describe the people who were planning military careers as the "best and brightest" of your class.

Ahh, you are thinking of the one or two guys who were all gung ho but not especially bright and had delusions about being a badass commando. Yeah, my school had some too. See the thing is though that those guys aren't the guys running the military. The guys you are thinking of end up as infantry grunts or something similar and exit the service after a few years. I have a cousin who is one of those guys. Smart but classic ADHD and socially stunted and not someone I'd trust right now to be in charge of anything. But he served two tours in Iraq and now he's in college so I have hope for him.

The guys in the officer corps (commissioned and higher level NCO) are almost invariably bright and hard working and most of them that I've ever met didn't talk much about their interest in the military. I have a classmate who is a major in the US Navy who never gave the slightest hint he was interested in a military career. He was quiet, very smart, and I would have guessed he'd be an engineer but instead he's become a heck of a good officer. I have a number of friends who were graduates of West Point and Annapolis and I've been impressed as hell by each one of them. Smart, incredibly disciplined, and I'd hire any one of them in a heartbeat.

The US military is an incredibly complicated and large organization with huge budgets, difficult goals, and a huge workforce. If you think managing all that is easy and doesn't require tremendous skill, you are delusional. Sure they make mistakes just like any other large organization but their mission is also more complicated than most and if they fail, people die.

Re:IN soviet russia

[lorenlal]

Mods. That comment may be redundant, it may be old and tired, but it is certainly not offtopic. In fact, in the grand scheme of frist psots!, it might be the most on-topic one I've seen in years.

Re:Sh.....

[HaZardman27]

I truly hope this is sarcastic, because the ignorance of this statement baffles me. To say the military is comprised only of self-serving individuals who seek some sort of sick pleasure from killing people is offensive to everyone who served or is currently serving. Military members don't get free food, clothes, or housing more than anyone else with a job does. There are allowances for these necessities that are simply an extension to a member's base pay, which for enlisted members would be terribly low otherwise. If you worked a minimum wage job for the same number of hours per week as an average military member, you would probably make more money than their monthly base pay.